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What is reseller web hosting?

Reseller web hosting is a type of web hosting in which you buy a large amount of space and data transfer (bandwidth) from a large web hosting company, and split it up into smaller pieces, to resell it to your customers. This is a low cost and relatively low risk way of starting your own hosting company. For web design companies it is an easy way to enable them to offer a complete service to their customers - web site design and hosting in one package.

You can manage all of your accounts from one interface, allocate software, set limits, view stats, customize alerts, run reports, and more. Normally, the fact that you are reselling the web hosting from another company is not obvious to your customers.

Usually you have a control panel which allows you to choose how much disc space and data transfer you give to each customer. You can add and maintain accounts in real time. You can create your own plans and set your own prices. Some hosts also provide you with private nameservers so that the fact that you are a reseller is hidden from your customers.

The main advantages of reseller web hosting

• You don't have to buy or maintain the web server.
• You don't need to be an expert on web servers. Reseller hosts are not responsible for maintaining web server services, or other maintenance related tasks. These are the responsibility of your web host.
• When a customer has a problem they will contact you, and if it is a problem with the server, you will simply pass it on to your web host.
• You can set your own prices and choose which features you offer to your customers.
• Most hosts who offer reseller hosting have more than one plan to choose from. This means that you can start with a small plan and move to a larger one when you have more customers.

The main disadvantages of reseller web hosting

• If your web host is unreliable, your business will suffer.
• You will have to pay your web host for the disk space and data transfer of the reseller plan that you have, even if you don't have enough customers to use it all.
• You are responsible for collecting the payments from your customers.

Another way to use a reseller hosting account

If operate a number of web sites, rather than having them spread over a number of web hosts you could buy a reseller account and simply use all the web space yourself instead of selling it to customers. This means that you can allocate the disk space and data transfer that you need for each of your sites - and alter it as required.

You could of course use some of the web space for your own sites and sell the rest of it to customers.

The main disadvantage of hosting all your sites on one account is that if the server is down all of your sites are down. However, will cost less to have one reseller account than a number of separate accounts.